Karan Chhabra

Every third-year has heard it: “When I was in your position, I was taking 24-hour calls every other night. If my resident was there, I was there ...”
We’re regaled about the glory days, without shelf exams, without phlebotomists, and -- by God -- without those work-hour restrictions. The days when medical students wouldn’t dare ask their residents for help, or residents their chiefs, or chiefs their attendings, and so on. ...

“Can you hear it?” she asked with a smile. The thin, pleasant lady seemed as struck by her murmur as I was. She was calm, perhaps amused by the clumsy second-year medical student listening to her heart.
“Yes, yes I can,” I replied, barely concealing my excitement. We had just learned about the heart sounds in class. This was my first time hearing anything abnormal on a patient, though it was ...

Placebos work. This isn't news. The term "placebo" was coined 60 years ago to describe how one-third of people respond to pills without any active drug in them. Twenty-five years later, we learned how they work: through endorphins produced by the body that work just like morphine. Today placebos are everywhere: from mothers kissing boo-boos to international drug trials.
A recent paper, though, shows that all placebos aren't created equal. As expected, ...

Minutes from melting in the summer heat, I dumped my stuff at a table and homed in on the hospital café’s soda display for something -cold. The gentleman at the next table glanced my way and said, "Are you in the medical field?"
"Yes sir, I’m a medical student."
He eyed my drink and asked, "Did you hear that diet soda can increase your risk of diabetes by 70%? Even just a few ...

Catherine Rampell recently wrote up an often-overlooked aspect to the doctor shortage debate:

Thousands of foreign-trained immigrant physicians are living in the United States with lifesaving skills that are going unused because they stumbled over one of the many hurdles in the path toward becoming a licensed doctor here.
The United States already faces a shortage of physicians in many parts of the country, especially in specialties where foreign-trained physicians are most ...

Dr. Chris Nickson recently asked, if a Martian landed on Earth and looked at how we do medical education, what would she think?

Could it really be true that so many dedicated, brilliant people with the same objectives could be doing exactly the same thing at the same time without sharing their resources? … That they could put so much work put into teaching sessions that so few actually ...

Inhalation. Exhalation. Perspiration. Equivocation. Self-Abnegation. Devastation. Urination.
The list of things I’ve endured in the name of getting to medical school could go on, and I doubt it’s any different from my classmates’. But we’re here, finally, freshly white-coated and already racing just to stay on track.
The White Coat Ceremony was a timely, though sometimes tearful reminder of what we did to get here, why we did it, and what we’re ...